Part XII of the short story ‘Sayonara’
Capt. Roy’s Food Chronicles Continues… — Part 2 of a possible 4
For a few Sunday evenings, Capt. Roy, the grandest foodie ever to walk on earth, would take a long walk to Arin’s house. A ritual he kept up until he sadly fell ill a few months later.
This is how the story goes: After his father retired, Arin no longer lived in Trishul Park but in the nearby ‘civil area,’ equidistant from Capt. Roy’s ‘modern’ apartment. It sat in the back of beyond, swampy moors reclaimed for random housing neighbourhoods, at the deep western perimeter of the town of Alwal.
Arin explicitly remembers getting peeved on account of an automatically uninspiring gentleman who lived on the ground floor of Capt. Roy’s apartment, half-heartedly bought in 1989, once had to dash off an angry complaint letter—about this waist-deep-in-frustration drongo who came to be known as Mental Uncle, suffering from a particular Main Character Syndrome, a bheja fry, brain fry, ever to roam the earth, or the unsightly compound wall of their grubby piece of real estate—probably titled ‘Not so modern apartment,’ addressed to the editor of the local news daily, which the gratuit also read regularly.
Acting foolishly, it seemed, became his own forte! Otherwise, why would he treat any visitor to the apartment as a potential trespasser? Even as he prowled within the compound wall like a… predator! A behaviour that clearly meant something intentionally mean, befitting a man with an absolute lack of a specific human quality, moral perception, or mental state: character attributes that suggest bad public behaviour when speaking to guests or visitors about entrance into the apartment building. The prowler literally traipsed for potential ‘prey’ to catch and irritate, as if the whole apartment building—bluntly named Modern Apartments—was his exclusive private property; no one could enter without his personal authorization. The flat name was really a misnomer; it might as well have been renamed Swamplands Apartments or given an even more suitable title: A Predator’s Apartments, which could have been the ultimate clincher of a deal for its most bothersome occupant, who really enjoyed blocking every visitor who tried to enter its narrow acreage of apartment premises, sometimes mistakenly intercepting even its hard-luck owners from entering or visiting anyone else’s flat within the compound he patrolled like a man truly possessed, covering every nook and cranny of the paltry parcel of flats.
[More about that part of the story, which is a sort of interpretation of a gruff gentleman who resided in one of the hastily constructed ‘not so modern’ apartments on the swamplands of Alwal, who went on to be playfully known as ‘Mental Uncle.’
Whether or not he deserves that moniker, it is up to your good offices to decide what’s most reasonable for this cranky, impolite ‘gentleman,’ who had at all times been at his inequitable best, trying to prevent every visitor from entering the apartment which he patrolled like a one-man security system—as if there is no life outside of this squat, whitewashed smokestack, a hovel of high rise. The story will be out in the next blog, titled ‘The Old Man and His Apartment.’]
Epilogue:
Capt. Roy corresponded in English pretty well himself. Army Supply/Service Corps, his beloved regiment where he worked all his life, would have ensured he did. When he penned ‘To Whom It May Concern’ like brief declarations or statements, he provided, while certifying that the details contained within the document are true to the best of his knowledge and that it is being shared with honesty; he sent cheerful missives to food suppliers and wholesalers, requisitioning them to ferry more supplies to the supply depots spread across the Army cantonment area. Keeping this in mind, it is safe to say that, throughout his Army career, he kept up the habit of writing in convenient babu English. But in all likelihood, and the point that needs factual reiteration is that Capt. Roy’s industrious food habits had already taken root here at this very garrison command: the large-scale Army go-downs and warehouses were piled up to the ceiling with large stockpiles of military food supplies meant for social clubs, officers’ messes, and canteens. Who wouldn’t feel encouraged by the massive food supplies being loaded, unloaded, and stored in the deep sheds in the Sub Area?
Capt. Roy felt easily inspired by what he commanded and controlled at his workplace: clearly, a veritable foodie was in the making. On off days, especially Sunday mornings, he’d rise early, finish his morning ablutions in a jiffy, and waltz into the smallish kitchen, well stocked with butter, ghee, and the Bengali staple mustard oil for caramelizing just about any food—whether preparing fish, meat, or veggies. With single-minded allegiance to his haute cuisine fetish, he’d rattle and bang whole sets of utensils, kadais, saucepans, and handis, which Mrs. Roy had concealed safely away the night before, though all at arm’s length. On holidays, Capt. Roy employed them in total abandon, no questions asked. Anyhow, Mrs. Roy tried to holler from the bedroom that he needed to be more mindful while he cooked—meaning don’t get too excited and spoil the kitchen! But to no avail, because his culinary experimentation begins now, and no one can interrupt him. The raw provisions have been bought from the Army canteen, stored in the fridge, or set on the kitchen shelves. His mission: to eat a variety of dishes at lunch and dinner, no strings attached. Just eat and enjoy life.
Day-to-day management and logistics oversight required his specialized supervision, juggling diverse duties and responsibilities to ensure all required food supplies, fuel, rations, and other materials listed in interdepartmental company requisitions were transported to the Army corps headquarters and its units, including the combat artillery and infantry divisions, workshops, and training battalions. Broadly, Capt. Roy captained everything well.
Possibly as a direct consequence of that age-old, unchecked pattern of eating habits while in service, give or take a few years into the mid-’90s, he began to sound incoherent: unable to speak in a flowing way. Funny bits of his conversation became less funny. He spoke with an effort, causing obvious strain on himself, whereby disgorging huffs and puffs, breath rasping, while forming even a brief sentence to articulate, morphed into a routine difficulty for him. All of these have probably been induced by high blood pressure and being overweight for many years continuously as he reached his late sixties with far less mental coolness than he’d have foreseen for himself in his retired life. His legendary sense of joviality was largely intact. But on occasions, it did seem it was irretrievably shrunk from social conversations, even as he knowingly suffered from nagging health issues that wouldn’t, he knew it as much, easily heal in old age. Sounding optimistic, he’d usually say, “No problem, my dear. I’d still eat more. Life is for eating good food and living happily!”
The day-to-day demands of moving around made him feel impatient and unsettled just sitting down to write, let alone putting together a whole letter. So he’d like Arin to help him out with the task. If Arin helped him draft official letters to be sent pronto to the administrators of Praktan Sainik Sangha, an Army ex-servicemen association, based in one of Kolkata’s salubrious suburban outskirts, that would be great. Arin would laugh and say, “Why not?”—always happy to help.
To notify the ‘concerned people,’ Capt. Roy would be interested to know whether he could auction off his Army-assigned plot of land, which he no longer desired to keep. Arin would write by hand on the pre-stamped Inland India letter cards that Capt. Roy always brought along in his cloth bag. He would steer the huge poundage of his body comfortably by settling down, plonking down rather like a sack of potatoes, in a way that made one a touch amused by the sight of the extravagant slowness of an overweight retired gentleman, his breath rasping as he tried to take a seat on a single-seater couch with a cup of tea and crispy thin arrowroot biscuits to go with it.
All the morning walks he had grown intensely fond of every day helped him, not that it didn’t, but, as one felt, only minimally, to keep himself, as he’d often reiterate in a kind of subtle bombast: “fighting fit,” mainly because he continued to eat voraciously at home and kept up the momentum, sustaining success in feasting nicely. And at home only, as eating out was not an option then: eateries or food joints of any kind at all were god-forbiddingly unavailable (unlike in today’s times, you find a glut of oily junk food stalls on either side of every road, on every corner, nook and cranny, and everywhere, and all over) in the quiet residential neighbourhoods of Alwal back at the very last part of the 1980s or till the late ‘90s.
(End of Part 2 of a possible 4)
(To be continued…)
(End of part XIII)
By Arindam Moulick